Certainly this man, notwithstanding his youth, understands the improvisation of life, and astonishes even the acutest observers. For it seems that he never makes a mistake, although he constantly plays the most hazardous games. One is reminded of the improvising masters of the musical art, to whom even the listeners would fain ascribe a divine infallibility of the hand, notwithstanding that they now and then make a mistake, as every mortal is liable to do. But they are skilled and inventive, and always ready in a moment to arrange into the structure of the score the most accidental tone (where the jerk of a finger or a humor brings it about), and to animate the accident with a fine meaning and soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Isn’t it interesting that one goes through the entirety of life aware of only their own experience. Could we ever know that whatever the boggins goes inside anothers bulb? Who is to say someone else is not a shapeshifting Martian or an animated figure in a simulation or some strange bunguldinging phenomenon you don’t have words or imagination for?
Even if we’re all the same deep down, we cut and carve the world in different ways. This person has this God, that person has that God, yet another person has no God, and that person in the corner believes he is The God. How differently do each of them experience the world?
Over the course of many years, a suspicion crystallized for me that how I live and experience life may not be the whole picture. That what I make of the human condition may not be what others make of it. That some pictures of the world may even be better - true-er? - than others, that some people get it - they get what living is, and actually live life - and I don’t.
It started by closely observing fellow humans like David Attenborough observes creatures in the wild. There are many things that others seem to do naturally for which I could find no correlate in my own experience.
Take dancing, for example. Some people seem to just get it. They hear the beats; their body moves in sync and, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, produces an elegant motion of arms, legs, head and frame that has rhythm and cadence and balance and harmony and grace and symmetry. When I do it, what appears is a spectacle of disjointed lego blocks on stilts being shaken up by an earthquake.
On occasion, I’ve turned to others for dance wisdom. “Shift your weight to the other leg,” they say. “Uh huh?”, I say (60% of my body weight is water, and no one ever taught me how to swirl it down one limb or the other). “You gotta move it move it. You gotta shake it shake it”, they say. “Say what?!”, I say.
Over time, my suspicion grew into an existential inquiry. Of all the people who are living, maybe only a few are “truly living”? Like a wistful android looking at others and wondering what “living” really means - not in its low-resolution monochrome version, but in all its rawness, realness, richness, and radiance - I chased this question for a long time.
Eventually, I found an answer. This is the story of that quest.
But to tell it, I would have to start with something else: taste.
I have a taste for writing. When a piece of writing is good, I can tell. When a piece of writing is crap, I can tell too. I can even tell how to turn crappy writing into something less crappy: remove or replace a word, rearrange that phrase, come up with a more fitting metaphor. If I have written something that is not good enough, it doesn’t sit well with me: I feel a mental itch to make it better.
Not everyone has a taste for writing. Some cannot read. Others, when given an exquisite piece of text, exclaim, “What are they trying to say!?” or “Why not use simpler words?” or “Why can’t they use bullet points?” Among these, some believe that taste is purely subjective. “In my humble opinion, this book, which you consider the finest achievement in human literature, is not worth the paper it is written on!”. Others, in the spirit of all-encompassing acceptance, deny the existence of taste altogether, “there is no good or bad. Anything goes! It’s all human expression!”.
Regardless of where one stands on topic, humans have found principles of good writing. “Do not use filler words”, “Show, Don’t Tell”, “Prefer action verbs to nouns and adverbs”, yada yada. Many of them are taught in writing schools.
To some extent, being mindful of principles of good writing can make one’s writing better. But great writing seems to be doing something different. It often deviates from these principles in just the right way at just the right moments. It has a sense of naturalness and truth and aliveness and energy and electricity and flow and expansiveness. This is because great writers are not conscientiously following the principles of good writing, but following something else: their taste. Or feelings. Or inner experience. And those things are prior to any principles.
Some people have a taste for food. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but do I detect a dash of coriander in this?”, they say. Not only can they tell when something tastes good, but also how to make something taste better. “this needs more salt”; “this could do with a squeeze of lemon”. Every now and then they can even detect the signature of the chef in the cuisine, just like one can tell a writer from their written voice. “The food tastes different now. Did they change the chef?”
If you do not have a taste for food, comments like that might leave you scratching your head. If that is you, you also probably tend to gobble down good food without relishing it, just like those who do not have a finer appreciation for literature will go through a well-written text without enjoying it. And you might not be able to tell if a dish can be improved by an addition of salt or seasoning just like those without a taste for literature are not able to tell how to make it better with a change of word or rearrangement of a phrase.
As in writing, there are those who believe that taste is a matter of subjective opinion - one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Others believe that taste is objective - whether something is delicious or not says everything about the food, and nothing about the person eating.
Just like there are principles that can make a piece of writing good: there are principles that can make something taste good. Salt enhances flavour, acid balances it, and fat carries it. A delicious meal is something that indulges more than one of our taste centres: the more the better. Salted Caramel tastes better than either salt or caramel: putting the salty and the sweet together produces something much better than the sum of its parts. So it is with lemonade (sour, sweet, salty). Or coffee and chocolate (bittersweet). Another one: a contrast in texture works well. A runny egg and a crispy toasted bread make each other better, a perfect grilled cheese sandwich has a crusty exterior and a soft interior.
Like writing, the taste is prior to principles: the principles are common patterns found in what tastes good, they are post-hoc abstractions. A person with good taste is not someone who is mechanically following the principles of good taste - it is not the case that the person tastes something and goes “this does not adhere to the principles, so it tastes bad!”. Rather, they are actually tasting, they are experiencing, and it is their senses that feed them back the feeling of “yummy…soooo good” or “ew, something is off with this!”
I used to imagine myself as one of those who do not possess a proper sense of taste for food. I would tell myself I don’t “get” food, that I am not a foodie, that food is merely fuel for my body, that I am happy to eat anything. A thought of the form “this spoonful of sauce that just touched base with my tongue could do with more salt” would never occur to me.
For the most part, life flew merrily by. I was low-maintenance, an easygoing customer in restaurants who would never complain about the food, and at dinner parties, I made for a happy-go-lucky guest, grateful for anything served, at times indifferent to any culinary suffering that other guests might have been going through, at other times unable to offer a discerning appreciation for the delicious food the hosts might have taken great pains to prepare.
And then I started to cook.
Cooking without tasting is like sketching blindfolded. Although tasting well does not require one to know how to cook (it doesn’t matter whether you know ‘how the sausage is made’), and though one can produce a good meal by merely following a recipe, the true art and genius of cooking lies in improvisation, in adjusting balance on the go, in paying attention to the actual experience of tasting something and using it to ask “What could I do to make this taste better?”. Cooking well does require tasting well.
Some people seem to have a “natural hand” for cooking. I suspect those who don’t must be doing something similar to what I used to do when I started: treat the recipe like a fixed algorithm, to be followed to the dot. Pay no attention to food as it was cooking. Eat cooked food quickly rather than taste mindfully. Pay no heed to seasonings like salt, lemon, and fat, think them unimportant. In short, what separates natural cooks from artificial cooks is what separates an AI writes a true poet: one “gets it” and the other doesn’t.
But if you’d asked me then, I wouldn’t have known that I didn’t “get it”; I didn’t even know there was something to “get”. I didn’t care about my experience of taste, so whatever I cooked worked for me. I would wolf it down.
If I did notice something off with the result of a recipe, I would double down on the precision of the proportions and the timings outlined in the recipe for the next iteration. The result might have been better. It might have even been outstanding, just like a poem generated by AI might have technical merits. But I still wouldn’t have “got it”.
If one were to look to write while tuned out of their sense of language, they would be inclined to do look for some rules of writing and mechanically follow them. If one were to eat while tuned out of their experience of taste, they would eat food robotically, as fuel. If one were to cook in the absence of sight, smell or taste, they would algorithmically follow the recipes. In the absence of an experience, this is the best they can do. In all of these scenarios, the person does not get “it”, they might not know that they do not “get it” - they might not be even aware that there is something to “get”; yet, from the outset, it might not look too different from those who “get it”.
If I did “get it”, I would have found that it is not necessary to follow a recipe to exactitude. The same ingredients can vary in taste - even tomatoes growing in different sides of the same tree can differ. A recipe might ask for two tablespoons of olive oil for two onions, but if the pan has a large surface area, that probably won’t be enough to coat it - one of the ways recipe writers determine the quantity of oil to be used.
Good cooks attend to the food as it cooks. The sizzle of oil. The aroma of garlic. The colour of cooked tomato. They see, smell, taste. And then adjust on the go. Importantly, they have in mind an actual tasting experience they are trying to “get at”.
Good cooking is not just about memorizing a recipe and following it to the tee: instead, it is about the senses.
For a while, I thought if I understand, I’d “get it”.
Maybe cooking didn’t sustain my attention because I did not understand the “whys” of cooking: Why do I preheat the pan before adding the oil? Why not let both heat up together? Why put ingredients in oil when it is sizzling hot? Why not do it at the start, so one can save up on the heat? Why pat dry the chicken before cooking? Why leave it to rest after cooking? Why does this thing goes after that thing, and not before? Does marination affect meat? Does it now, really?
To understand the magic, I read Samir Nosrat’s excellent book: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, turned my kitchen into a laboratory, and simultaneously embarked on some cooking experiments.1
I found some answers in chemistry, some in practical logic. It is recommended to “pat dry” the chicken before browning it because the water on the surface might otherwise lead to steaming the chicken. That will cook the chicken, but it won’t brown it. The browning is a result of the Maillard Reaction that only happens above the boiling point of water. Water escapes as steam when temperatures rise, so we need another medium: oil. If put the chicken before we heat is oil, it might start cooking before the desired temperature for Maillard Reaction has been achieved, and this might lead to chicken that is overcooked. We also cook both sides of the surface of chicken first, to “seal in the moisture”, so that the inside stays juicy and tender. If the inside is cooked before the outside has been sealed, it might lose moisture and become dry and rubbery. And allowing the chicken to rest after cooking helps the texture become juicier because it gives the proteins time to settle.
Recipes also follow an inner logic depending on their ingredients. The sequence is constrained by how long each ingredient takes to cook and how they affect each other. In Indian cooking, whole spices take longer to cook and so they are the first thing that goes in. They’re cooked in fat or oil because spices require a temperature much above the boiling point of water to cook properly, and oil achieves that without being vaporised. Garlic, if overcooked, turns bitter so it only cooked for a couple of mins. Tomatoes are added only after onions are cooked because the acid in tomatoes can prevent the softening of onions. The acid in tomatoes can also prevent the salt from dissolving and distributing evenly in the dish if added too early, so salt is added only after the tomato is partially cooked. Dairy should be added to acidic dishes at the last minute because otherwise, it will curdle.
My new-found understanding infused the activity of cooking with a fine layer of meaning. Once I realised the rationale and relevance of each instruction, I was more likely to pay it its due respect.
But did it help me see, smell, taste? Did it make me more likely to taste a sample of my stew, and say to myself “it needs more salt!”?
There’s a thought experiment in epistemology called Mary’s Room. It describes Mary, a scientist who exists in a black and white world where she has extensive access to physical descriptions of color, but no actual perceptual experience of color. The central question of the thought experiment is whether Mary will gain new knowledge when she goes outside the black and white world and experiences seeing in color.
Through knowledge and understanding, taste became for me what colour was to Mary.
But understanding it was far, far away from getting it. It did nothing to satisfy my niggling sense of “lack” in my perception of taste - because without attending to my own experience, I was looking in the realm of reason for something that belonged only in the realm of sense and experience. It was a wrong turn, a red herring, a dead end, a blind alley.
One route that took me away from getting it was doubling down on the strictness of the recipe. The other route that took me away was the realm of understanding and reason and whys. And then there was a third route.
For the longest while as a cook, I let other people be the sole judge and jury of what I had cooked. It made sense - I wasn’t attending to my own experience of taste - I didn’t trust it, so I trusted others’. Cooking well became a matter of making something that is delicious to others. That’s not a bad yardstick to have. Writers and filmmakers often read book reviews and listen to film critics.
But a chef who does not trust their own taste can only go so far. They cannot adjust the balance on the fly. They cannot improvise. Like a deaf musician or a blind painter, they cannot appreciate their own art.
A dependence on the validation of others, valuing their experience over your own is one step away from losing yourself in the experience of others, as victims of gaslighting might tell you. All serious artists, no matter how much they pander to the popular taste, have to come back to their own experience.
“Seven and a half out of ten”, said my hopelessly honest flatmate, as I asked him to score my palak paneer. I was missing an important ingredient listed in the recipe: double cream. Having already understood the somewhat fluid nature of a recipe (it’s not make-or-break), I wanted to improvise and not give up. To my mind, Cream = Yogurt + Butter + Sugar to some approximation, so I used that as a substitute. Not trusting my own judgement, I left the verdict to the willing guinea pig to my experiment. Seven and a half. I took it as a badge of honour.
A combination of intense introspection, the written description of the “zing!” of salt and the “tang!” of acid from Samir Nosrat’s cookbook, and my blind-tasting experiments led me to the truth that was staring me in the face all this time - a truth obvious to anyone who cares about their eating experience. The ultimate answer to the “whys” of a recipe, something that lies at the foundation to the inquiries of chemistry - the Maillard Reaction and caramelization and coagulation of proteins in marination and the breakdown of plant cell walls under heat, and the evolution of cooking practices, lies in the actual experience of taste.2
A chicken browned has complex flavours in its crispy exterior and is moist and tender in its interior. When this piece of tender, juicy, crispy chicken makes contact with your tongue, as you wrap your mouth around it and sink your teeth into it, the skin shatters and you experience an explosion of delight. Few moments in a meal can rival a bite of expertly-cooked chicken. It has creds to be among the finest pleasures known to man, right next to listening to a Bach symphony, witnessing the light ethereal beauty of Taj Mahal, and making connected love to a person you find beautiful.
Tilda Swinton in “I Am Love”: this is what “getting it” looks like
This experience of eating something delicious like that is an end in itself. It is a pure desire. One desires it not for the sake of someone else, not because others also seem to like it, not for some moral good, not because it is supposed to do so, not for society’s conventions or what society values, not for some status, not because it would make you thinner, beautiful, healthier, stronger, but because it is fundamentally pleasurable to your sense of taste.
Crucially - you, and other people wanting the same delicious experience, is the primary motivating force for cooking in the way we do, for the entire cooking industry, for Michelin star restaurants and cookery shows and cooking reality tv shows. This part of human exeprience - the sensations in my tongue and the aroma in my nose - has driven mankind since time immemorial, it is what motivated the ancient spice trade and seafaring voyagers looking for source of sweet, earthy cinnamon and the hot pungent black pepper, leading to the Age of Discovery, setting into motion the events of Colonialism and the world as it is today.
If one centres themselves on this experience, the steps one needs to do to get there fall in line; the wisdom and knowledge contained in the recipe is a mere by-product. People who are sensitive to taste have this experience - the aromas, flavours, sensations that food brings - centred in their lives, this is something that draws their attention naturally, this is what drives them to ask for a dressing to a salad or salt to taste.
How could I have missed this? I missed this because my attention has always been drawn to some other aspects of human experience - language, for example. I pay attention to words, relish metaphors, enjoy a clever turn of phrase. Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, it never occurred to me that others might not be the same way - just like I wasn’t the same way as them. They say “this needs more salt!”. I say “this needs an Oxford comma!”. I don’t notice what they were attending to, maybe they didn’t notice what I was attending to?
To cultivate a sense of taste is not a superpower. It does not require perfecting recipes, seeking knowledge through books, or getting the stamp of validation of others. It does not depend on anything external. It only requires turning inwards and tuning in more and more to a part of your human experience. To develop the skill of improvisation in cooking, to adjust on the go, to understand balance, to be able to make a dish taste better, to invent new dishes from the leftovers in your refrigerator, one need only pay attention to their sense of taste. It is possible to answer to why this, or why that, with the foundational reason: “it tastes better that way than otherwise”. Those who have paid attention to this sense, cultivated it, and gained wisdom from it, are the ones who “get it”.
Once I started attending to my experience of taste and brought it into awareness, it was as if I flipped a switch. A lightbulb came on, and a new reality of lived everyday experience revealed itself to me.
What I had thought of myself previously - that I did not care about taste - wasn’t completely true to how I moved in the world. If I had paid any attention to what I actually did (rather than what I told myself),3 I would have observed that I don’t just eat everything willy-nilly. Instead, I would leave out any discernible pieces of tomatoes when presented a salad: as if on auto-pilot. On a supermarket aisle, I would rarely buy carrots or potatoes. When choosing items from a menu, I would gravitate towards certain items and away from others. There were certain eateries I would want to visit again and again, almost instinctually. And I had lots of memories of food that, at the time I tasted it, had made my eyes lit up and made me go “I’d like some more of that, please!”.
The recollections of those ineffable sensations all came rushing back. The cool foamy creamy richness of the Avocado Shakes in Singapore. The moist warmth of the Omlette on Maggi - with waves of savouriness - at the roadside tea stall next to IIT hostel gate. At Cafe Qahwa where I used to play chess - the filling sweet and salty crunchy bites of Garlic Mushrooms on Toast while thinking of my next move. The thick and multilayered chicken curries of a restaurant named Midtown which would leave me licking the plate. The light sweetness of the dessert wine Ch Grangeneuve 2010 from Monbazillac at Oxford’s School’s Dinner. The smooth and silky nuttiness of my favourite Belgian chocolates.
My body had a sense of taste. It did reveal preferences for food in behavior. I just wasn’t aware of those preferences.
It wasn’t so much that my taste perception was dormant earlier. It wasn’t like I was blind and now I could see. Instead, I had vision, but thinking myself blind, I had stopped looking. Once I became aware of my vision, I started looking, and found that I could see clearer and further.
My new awareness of taste led me down unexplored paths in supermarket aisles. Maple syrup. Hmm…I wonder what that tastes like - is it the same sweetness as that of honey? I want this soft creamy tartness of this cheese, not the hard nutty butteriness of that cheese. And what’s this on the shelf? Roasted Almonds soaked in Honey: a tingle of excitement runs down my spine.
I even picked up foods I would otherwise reject, out of curiosity as to what I didn’t like about them. Tomato: a watery-tangy ball. What if I put some salt and pepper in it? Slightly more tolerable. Potatoes: bland chewy rubber. With seasoning - much, much better. Carrots: cold, hard and bland. What if I roast it - ah, what soft, warm, golden sweetness - like a friend’s cosy embrace on a rough rainy day.
My attention to taste not only led me to better self-knowledge - what I liked and what I didn’t - but led me to expand its range and possibilities. More and more sensations, aromas, flavours and food combinations came into my field of view. My auto-pilot attitudes to food - “Likey” this, or “Not-Likey” that - turned into an awake and nuanced curiosity for my senses: “What could I do to make this more of something I like, and less of something I dislike?”
How people respond to food in common culture started making sense. I started cooking without a dependence on the opinion of others. 4 And it became increasingly difficult for me to continue to gobble down bland unseasoned food when a little addition of a seasoning or a squeeze of lemon could make my experience much better at no extra cost.
I finally got it.
And became a more measured appreciator of food at dinner parties.
You might find all this amusing and obvious. You might be thinking: Good for him! He can taste better and cook well now - I never had any issues with that.
You might be thinking: “OMG! Just eat, man! No one goes into asking whys and reading books and doing blind experiments. That’s not what enjoying food is about!”
Or something like: “Guy zeroes in on something that is natural and obvious to everyone and makes a big deal out of it.
And you’d be right, of course.
First, there is always potential for more attunement, attention, awareness to one of our senses: taste. Sommeliers and professional tasters go through years of training. For it to be cultivated, one must start with paying attention to where they are currently, with deeper self-awareness. What do you like? What do you dislike? If one is out of touch with it - like I was - one must start with the basics and observe how their body responds. Surely you wouldn’t eat everything that exists in the universe - a dollop of sludge or a pile of yuck? There must be something you find disgusting. There must be something that you find deeply pleasurable: honey and fruits, maybe? Any starting point is valid, as long as its true. And then one can gradually expand the awarness by going deeper and deeper.
Food is needed for survival. So taste for food is universal and basic. It lends itself to direct perception. It is true that it part of human experience most people haven’t lost touch with. But it is possible that that there are other parts of one’s experience that one is tuned out of. If someone is tuned out of an experience, it is likely they are not even aware of it. Indeed, it might not be apparent to anyone in the world: to them from the inside, and to others from the outside.
The journey to “getting it” - to get one’s mind out of their way and develop an awareness of where one is, to attend to your inner experience of sensations, feelings, and intuitions, to trust it, cultivate it, and deepen it - is not limited to eating and tasting. but extends far into every aspect of human life: music and listening, drawing and seeing, mathematical intuition, moral sense, energy and feelings, desire and eros, connection and love, dance and movement, justice and equality, religion, science and spirituality. Its the wisdom contained in the popular quotes such as “Be yourself” and “Find your truth”, and all stories of quests where the answer leads back to the seeker.
To be continued…
For example, to “get” the effect of marination: I prepared four chicken breast pieces in different levels of marination, from unmarinated to marinated in salt, olive oil, yoghurt, and spices. I then cooked them together in the exact same way, followed by blind tastings. ↩
Well, apart from health and safety, but set that aside for a bit. ↩
Makes one think: what else do I tell themself is true but doesn’t align with the truth of how their body behaves? ↩
Though an unbiased opinion helps: even chefs employ professional tasters. When one is making food, one has to taste quite often - to balance the bitterness or sweetness or adjust the salt or reach the desired texture and thickness. The sensations of all these previous taste-in-the-making are still fresh in your memory. It is hard to separate those from those of the final product. When cooking by myself, I often leave the food for a while and come back to it to receive my own unbiased opinion. ↩